A blog about people, teams, culture, organisations, agile delivery and other things
I have been working with, writing about and speaking on communities of practice for many years now. That content is scattered in various places, like this blog, my company website and other platforms. So, I’ve brought it all together in one place.
Check it out at communitiesofpractice.work
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The term outcome is a brilliant way of describing the impact and value of doing something. I also like to use outcomes to help describe the capabilities of people and practices or disciplines. Let me explain why it’s so helpful.
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Back in November last year I wrote up a talk I gave at Lean Agile Brighton called Why can’t we all just get along?
I’ve given the talk at a few more conferences and written it up as an article on InfoQ called Bridging Silos and Overcoming Collaboration Antipatterns in Multidisciplinary Organisations. The most recent time I spoke about it was at Seacon in London, and that 20-minute talk is here; enjoy!
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For a little while, I was encouraging myself out of the house by setting the target of taking regular short videos of the New Brighton lighthouse at the mouth of the Mersey. Here are those videos taken between December 2022 and August 2023.
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This week, I have been back at the Agile Cambridge conference with Agile on the Bench with my co-host, Cara Bermingham.
Agile on the Bench is a friendly, low-fi, lunchtime, outdoor, agile meetup. A mix of 10min, mostly analogy-based talks about all things agile, people, teams, users and getting things done… outside, on a bench, in a park.
One of our speakers had to pull out last minute thanks to covid, so I went to my blog archives to find something suitable as a fill-in.
So here it is, updated and ready for a re-read.
* Photo of Mark Dalgarno speaking just before me, taken by Cara Bermingham
How do we know what’s going on when we’re working in remote or hybrid organisations? How do we get the right information to the right people, find what we need and bump into ideas that can lead to something else? Distributed workplaces make it hard, but not impossible. This post explores some of the ways that can enable sharing that helps teams remember, and people bump into information.
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The Team Onion book is now available for purchase.
If you’ve been following the work I’ve been doing over the past seven years on the Team Onion, you’ll see that it’s gone from from a model I used as a team tool to a short ebook to a website and then templates… and now I have expanded into a printed book.
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This week I designed a short retrospective to close a phase of work. The team were handing the work over to an ongoing client team, so it was a perfect time for reflection and a chance to collate advice to take forward.
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A Miro workshop, created with Jamie Arnold, that takes you from vision to measures, identifying your outcomes along the way.
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In my recent post, Why Can’t we all get Along, I discussed the value of overlapping roles in multi/inter/transdisciplinary teams and referred to using the broken comb shape to describe skills and capabilities. In this post, I’ll expand on that theory and add an approach for using it to help teams build empathy, understanding and opportunities for contributions.
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A while back, I created this sticker and was reminded of it this week during a meetup, so I thought I’d share it here.
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Ok, this title feels like clickbait; it’s such a common question I get asked and will likely entice some people and annoy others. So in this post, I will share some tactics and approaches to help your communities thrive while giving those putting pressure on you something to make them happy.
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For the last 9 months, I have been collating and sharing blog posts in a weekly newsletter called Posts from Awesome Folks*. I recommend doing it; it helps me keep up to date with what’s on people’s minds.
I have amassed a collection of RSS feeds and shared posts from around 350 authors around the themes of people and culture, organisations and systems, setting and measuring goals and, tools and approaches for teams. These posts come from both individual and organisational blogs, proving that people still blog. I love that people do; I write on my own blog, and I like the permanence of them over social media threads.
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I initially gave this talk at Lead Agile Brighton in October 2022, then updated and refined the slide deck for Agile Manchester in May 2023, so I’ve updated this post too.
I’ve noticed an increasingly worrying trend in the industry of focus on specialisms at the expense of collaboration, shared responsibility and valuable outcomes.
There might be many reasons for this, from organisational structures, changing workforces or uncertainty in the world. However, this trend can create silos across departments, between roles, and even in teams.
These silos mean that all the value from a multidisciplinary team is lost, people get pigeonholed, and we lose focus on creating valuable outcomes for our users.
In this post, I will explore this trend, some reasons we might be seeing it, and some approaches and techniques to break those silos down to work together.
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***Post updated 29th Sept 2023 with new name***
I have recently relocated to a new area, and I’m starting another new meetup*.
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I recently started a newsletter digest of blog posts and articles I like. I started doing it to read more blog posts again; committing to sending something out helps keep me on track and is similar to something I regularly did back when I was at GDS (archived by Tom Banister here). People have started subscribing and telling me how much they appreciate it too, which is an added bonus.
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I have worked with Communities of Practice in organisations for several years. One recent trend I have seen is people using the term community when talking about the more formal construct of a practice. When people overlook the attributes and values of a community, they miss out on what makes a community of practice magic, this post will explain the differences and overlaps.
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In 2016, I first introduced the Team Onion model (as the Agile Team Onion). Since then, it’s had a few iterations and now has a new website home of its own at teamonion.works.
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Another day, another Miro template. I have now published my Community of Practice Kick-off Canvas on the Miroverse.
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In a previous post, I wrote about Quick icebreakers for online meetings, (that don’t suck). In that post, I mentioned that I love using the Think Links game created by Edward de Bono to get people to think creatively and get the ice broken.
Continue readingA few years ago I tweeted a flowchart called “Should I say resources” and followed it up with a blog post and a file to print stickers. I find the term resources to be too ambiguous to be useful when talking about things and dehumanising when it’s used to describe people.
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I recently had the opportunity to work with the awesome people at Citizens Advice, guiding them in creating a capability and progression framework for the newly formed design, data and technology (DDaT) function. Being a forward-thinking organisation, they were open to trying something a bit different; this post describes the approach I used to help them do that.
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This week I ran a short retrospective to close a two-year-long project; I had limited time and ten willing participants. This post covers the approach I used to create space for reflection.
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I gave a talk at SEACON recently building on top of my previous blog post about assisted serendipity. I wanted to share the ideas in that talk here as it is very relevant to the current times. This long post covers why serendipity is essential and how we can create opportunities for it to happen, both in the workplace and while distributed.
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A quick post to share something that makes me smile. A slack* channel, yes another one, but it is one worth having.
Many of us are working from home, one of the challenges that come with this is leaving the house. It’s important to get outside to take a break, get some air and move our bodies. I find making public commitments a big motivator, so I started a slack channel in one of the communities I run called #daily-outside-photo. The point is to get outside, while there take a photo and share it with the channel. I love this channel. I love seeing people’s pictures and short comments. It brightens up my day.
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